Strange but True Excuse Me I Mean ‘True’

I mentioned Rorty. Well I’ve been reading him lately. I knew he had a habit of saying strange things – but he says even stranger things than I realized he had a habit of saying. That is, he says some things that are so strange I find myself surprised that he says them. Taken aback, disconcerted, astonished, amazed. Maybe that’s why he says them – so that people will have such reactions. That is one reward of saying things, of course. I know people who tell absurd lies for that very purpose – the fun of causing their interlocutors to splutter and wheeze and argue. Maybe that’s what Rorty is doing. He only does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.

Probably not though. At least not entirely. But then – oh well, you have a look.

Pragmatists would like to replace the desire for objectivity – the desire to be in touch with a reality which is more than some community with which we identify ourselves – with the desire for solidarity with that community.

No…I don’t think he is joking. I think he’s a disaster.

My rejection of traditional notions of rationality can be summed up by saying that the only sense in which science is exemplary is that it is a model of human solidarity.

Both of those from Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth, page 39.

The tradition in Western culture which centers around the notion of the search for Truth…is the clearest example of the attempt to find a sense in one’s existence by turning away from solidarity to objectivity. The idea of Truth as something to be pursued for its own sake, not because it will be good for oneself, or for one’s real or imaginary community, is the central theme of this tradition.

Ibid, page 21. The first two from ‘Science as Solidarity,’ the third from ‘Solidarity or objectivity?’ In the third, it’s clear in context that that tradition is a bad one that we gotta get rid of.

Rorty does have a point about obsession with the concept of truth within analytic philosophy, but he seems to think that the same obsession runs through the whole of society; which it does not. Most of the people I meet have never seriously considered whether truth is objective, but I do not move in exalted circles – present company excepted.

I’m not a (neo-)pragmatist, nor an aficionado of Analytic philosophy, so I wouldn’t put things in quite Rorty’s terms. But a couple of points are broadly recognized across many philosophic “schools” or perspectives: 1) one can not simply strip concepts or meanings off of (our experience of) reality and them compare them to reality itself. (And even if one could, exactly what and how would one compare?) In short, “objective reality” is as much a part of our symbolically mediated experience as our knowledge or experience of it. To say something like, “A proposition corresponds to a state-of-affairs by virtue of sharing the same logical form),- (leaving aside any questions as to whether propositional form is essential to either knowledge or meaning),- adds nothing to the matter, except for perhaps mystical befuddlement. 2) One can not get back behind the point at which “we” have arrived at through somehow unwinding through its historical development to uncover its “external” point of origin. This is not at all to say that such an exercize is worthless and tells one nothing, but only that it occurs essentially from the same vantage point which it investigates and does not function as a ground of its validity. (Judging by several reviews, this last point was what caused Bernard Williams in his last book to include Rorty among the “truth deniers”, but, on the one hand, he apparently offered no refutation of the point, while, on the other, his book actually concerned itself with the “function” of truth rather than its “nature” or meaning, and could perhaps be accused of subtlely functionalizing the notion of truth.) One shouldn’t underestimate the strength and temptation of Hegel-style rationalist triumphalism,- (“The real is the rational and the rational is the real.”)-, a version of which can be found in Analytic philosophy in the work of Davidson, though I, of course, have my reservations about it. A thorough-goingly systematic, rational achievement of understanding the world must necessarily understand less “advanced” perspectives only by incorporating them in its own perspective and understanding them as irrational. But, on the one hand, that amounts to assuming some “final”, unalterable rational understanding, whereas, on the other, any effort at translation between perspectives to achieve understanding transforms both sets of understandings, (Gadamer’s “fusion of horizons”.) But perhaps the main point is that the recognition of differences between achieved perspectives does not imply any abandonment of distinctions about “truth”, “objectivity”, and the like, since such distinctions are part and parcel of the achieved perspectives. Equally, there is no need to view the matter as a denial of the external existence of reality itself, with its own separate implicature and “economy” of explanation, apart from human concerns or experiences, since it is a matter of differences in the understandings of that implicature and in the economy of explanation assigned to it, which is what has changed and will change, which is precisely what is meant by the “progress” of science.

The matter can be put in other, more Heideggerian terms, (which subsequently was to lead on to post-structuralist shenanigans), by asking whether the conditions which allow for distinctions between true and false are themselves capable of being judged true or false? To be true or false, a claim or proposition must have a meaning, else it is neither true, nor false, but rather senseless. (Of course, Husserlian phenomenology has long been criticized for conflating truth with meaning, but that does not refute or negate the matter, but only complicates it.) The inquiry into the meaning conditions of “truth”, its “origins” and “dvelopment”, is a murky affair, which is conducted in Heidegger’s work under several tropes, the earliest and most common one being the “Truth of Being”. But the point itself is clear enough: for there to be a distinction between true and false they both must occupy a common “medium”, which cannot be “certified” by “correct” judgments, based presumably on the “correct” method, since that just evades any question of the presuppositions on which they are based. In other words, for truth to exist, there must be a coeval possibility of error: falsehood must somehow equally exist within the ambit of a “complete” truth, as the correlate of an ultimately objective reality. So the question at issue can be boiled down to this: is an excavation of the “foundations” of an independently existent objective reality the basis of truth and thus of the world of our common understandings (or “solidarity”), or is the projection of grounds for objective truth based on our commonly evolved understandings (or “solidarity”)? And a correlated question is: what is the basis of (our ethical obligation toward?) the recognition of reality and objective truth? Is reality the basis of our responsibility toward truth or is our responsibility toward reality the basis of truth? The upshot of such a question can be seen by considering that a claim to secure possession of the certified truth about independently existing, ultimate objective reality amounts to a disavowal of our responsibility for it, amounts, by lodging our finitude “inside” pre-given reality, to a kind of “bad faith” or “inauthenticity” with respect to the grounds of our own claims. If epistemological theories do not necessarily lay claim to such secure possession, they nonetheless assume it as their terminus ad quem.

Finally, that statement of Rorty’s about science being the a distinctive model of human solidarity is simply another version, from a slightly altered perspective, of quite common avowals about the “open” and pacific nature of scientific discourse. I myself think it is a somewhat short-circuited formulation, just as with Popperian animadversions about science being necessarily correlated with “open” society. I think the consideration of science is best served by stripping it of its fetishized “autonomy” and viewing it as a distinctive socio-cultural institution with specific strengths and dysfunctions of its own, whose rational normativity is “grounded” in its interactions with “our” common world, rather than in authoritarian fiat. But that’s perhaps a whole ‘nother can of worms. Still it’s always amusing when defamiliarization is regarded as a cause for offence. Wasn’t that the whole original point about “thaumezein”, that it was defamiliarizing, that estrangement and awakening are flip sides of the same coin? To regard a defamiliarizing move as equivalent to supreme perfidity occurs only to those addicted to “identity thinking”.

WRONG translation, Karl. More like, know your rudiments of intellectual history before rejecting anything in accordance with your own prejudices or preferences. (Yeah, that, too, is part of intellectual history…)

‘Finally, that statement of Rorty’s about science being the a distinctive model of human solidarity is simply another version, from a slightly altered perspective, of quite common avowals about the “open” and pacific nature of scientific discourse.’

No it isn’t. Not unless you have an exceptionally expansive idea of what ‘from a slightly altered perspective’ means – in which case you’re using rhetoric instead of argument. Rorty would approve, but others would not.

(I say that last bit partly because Rorty explicitly avows his approval of rhetoric in place of argument, and partly because he relies on exceptionally, absurdly expansive definitions in practically everything he says. He plays around with equivocation in almost every sentence. It works for people who don’t know from argument, which is no doubt why he’s influential with lit crits, and it makes him an absurdity to people who do, even a little, which is why he’s not influential elsewhere.)

The opposition between dialectic and rhetoric stems from the Stoics, for whom the former meant analytic logic and the latter empty verbiage. In the thinking of the ancient classical world, that was decidedly the minority view. The Platonic-Aristotelian account was that rhetoric was the clothing that dialectic must necessarily wear: their argument was with sophistry, not rhetoric per se. In the end, it’s nothing but muddleheadedness to think that there is a hard and fast distinction between argument and rhetoric or that one can get behind the inferential structures of natural language (by minding one’s p’s and q’s) and clean up the mess. That’s part of Rorty’s point, and if he chooses “expansive” and rather floppy prose as the means to get it across, then so be it. (He is among the mildest of traffickers in post-modernism, and, though I not his biggest fan, any more than of, say, Alistair MacIntyre, I think they are both worth considering.) Similarly, to say that science is the “same” as “literature”, is simply to make the point that science is a type of discourse, which is largely true, though it is a type of discourse that can be distinguished from other types, (such as, e.g., law or histriography), but then the criteria for its demarcation is itself another discourse to be interpellated into the discussion. To take such moves as a shocking offense to decency says more about the presuppositions of those who are so eager to be shocked than about the merits of the case.

The “problem”, the aporia, remains that realities and concepts can neither be separated, nor identified, and I think that is a problem that bears thinking about. And I would doubt its “solution” lies in a robust re-enforcement of common sense. On the one hand “common sense” would thereby require explication, and, on the other, if common sense were already the answer, there would be no spirit of inquiry, nor any anxiety and conflict. (“Here’s one hand, here’s the other.”)

That Rorty has not been “influential”, except among literary critics, is a claim that would seem to require some documentation. On the one hand, I don’t see how his particular brand of prose could be applied to the practice of literary criticism. On the other hand, his primary work was “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature”, which recycled versions of arguments from elsewhere about the end of the epistemological project in philosophy, and that book was certainly widely read and “influential”.

The claim about Rorty’s influence has already received some documentation, in a post above. If you want more, take a look at some reference books sometime. The Oxford Companion to Philos for instance has a brief and rather dismissive entry with a sly joke in it; the Cambridge Encyc of Philos doesn’t even have an entry for Rorty. Which puts him in the same august company as Derrida and Ayn Rand: people who get shelved in philosophy at Barnes & Noble, but…

Well, hurray for our side! Since that’s about all you’ve accomplished, since you haven’t made any substantive points, aside from a purely rhetorical claim about an iron-clad distinction between rhetoric and argument. (But then, wakka wakka wakka wakka.) So Rorty gives you headaches? But philosophy is all about headaches, those bumps you get on your head from running up against the limits of language.

I suppose that bit about Derrida and Rand was meant as a sly joke. Next thing you know Oxford will be awarding Rand an honorary, if posthumous, degree. It’s a bit like learning that Sraffa is not an economist because Milton Friedman says so. But there’s a something of a self-denying ordinance at work here: there would be no need to denounce Rorty’s malign influence, if it were really negligible. Actually, I think Blackburn was more or less right about Rorty’s irritating and sometimes obtuse complacency, but he was, after all, reviewing a whole book of essays responding to him by some fairly prominent academic philosophers. But then, since Rorty is effectively declaring the end of philosophy, you’d rather expect them to be a bit defensive and guarded about their meal-ticket.

By the way, though I’ve never read Derrida, of course, all that palavering about the “metaphysics of presence” is not just nonsense, but contains a real analytic point. The phrase derives from Heidegger’s diagnosis that being in the Western metaphysical tradition has always been construed as “presence”, since “that which remains the same amidst all change” must also somehow be accessible. So, just to illustrate the application of the point, in Kant, there is a deep systematic connection between the “Critique of Pure Reason” and “The Critique of Practical Reason”. It’s not just that the second “Critique” is intended to resolve the gaps in the antinomian conflict left dangling in the first “Critique”, but, since, in this context the validation of knowledge has been subtended by appeal to the will, Kant is interested in seeking out the “pure rational will”, defined as “the will which always will’s itself”, which he finds in the moral good will, as the only end-in-itself, leading on to a remarkably internalist/intentionalist account of moral action. Hence supervenes the “moment” of the meatphysics of presence, in this case, in remarkably Newtonian form, as “the constant action of forces.” But I suppose it’s always true that what you don’t understand can’t hurt you.